The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In electronic devices, e.g., legacy servers, the configuration of thermal cooling devices such as cooling fans may be fixed and designed for a configuration running with a heavy system load using the maximum number of electrical and/or optical components. This configuration may be a “worst case” type scenario and result in the device generating the maximum possible thermal heat. However, in some cases such a worst case scenario may not be occurring, for example if the device does not include the maximum number of optical and/or electrical components possible, or if the device is not running at a maximum system load. In these situations, a cooling system designed for a worst case scenario may not be necessary. In other cases a specific component may run with a significantly heavier system load than other components, which may generate a localized “hot spot” in the device. In other situations, a single cooling device such as a fan may fail, and therefore the cooling capacity of the device may be impacted.